> Nick Whitelegg wrote:
>
>> Such a statement needs qualification. Exactly why is it useless?
>
> Because it doesn't cover Sweden. I cannot show off the things
> I've been working on the last 18 months. The previous version was
useless because it was too slow. It all reminds me of the
> performance problems Wikipedia had during its first 3 years.
>

And look at wikipedia now. Its not a race and I'm sure in another year OSM
will look very different from today. The lack of something to look at in
Sweden is regrettable but its not like this is the end of the world. Give
it a chance and I'm sure in the end the project (all of us collectively)
will deliver.

>> As for apathy and cynicism, I see none of it in evidence. I see an
enthusiastic community,
>
> Which is far smaller than it could have been. The apathy you
> don't see is the people who only took a look at the project and
> never returned again, because it was useless in too many ways.
>

Maybe, who knows. If the project had had google like funding from the
outset then maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion. From little
acorns though...

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

> Maybe, who knows. If the project had had google like funding from the
> outset then maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion. From little
> acorns though...

I seem to recall somewhere in the old grey cells that this was started
as providing a free map for the UK? In the same way that the US already
has one. So the fact that thee is anything outside that area seems like
a bonus to me.

The one thing *I* worry about is that the interest will grow to a level
where one of the big boys takes over ( like eGroups ) and destroys the
nice feel by loading everything up with adverts. We need to provide
funding to maintain and expand the support. Distributing functions will
help that ( Heck I've a couple of fast machine here that do very little
all day, but don't have the time to load things up :( ) but personally
I'd prefer to try and AVOID google funding and all the crap that would
come with it. The adverts when not logged in are just a waste of
bandwidth but I can see the income may be necessary at present :(

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

> Sorry Andy so few of the lists I use need me to change the address ;)
>
> Andy Robinson wrote:
>
> > Maybe, who knows. If the project had had google like funding from the
> > outset then maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion. From little
> > acorns though...
>
> I seem to recall somewhere in the old grey cells that this was started
> as providing a free map for the UK? In the same way that the US already

Nah, it was worldwide from the start but had this UK focus because I
live here and organised the first mapping party here, stuff like that.

This focus isn't something I'm proud of, and work to make it more
global. Apologies to people in australia that don't even have country
boundaries on the slippy map yet.

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

SteveC a écrit :
>
> Nah, it was worldwide from the start but had this UK focus because I
> live here and organised the first mapping party here, stuff like that.
>
> This focus isn't something I'm proud of, and work to make it more
> global. Apologies to people in australia that don't even have country
> boundaries on the slippy map yet.

There's quite a few things that are hard to do for non-UK users...

For example, is anyone outside UK has been able to send money for the
OSMonth ?

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

> SteveC a écrit :
> >
> > Nah, it was worldwide from the start but had this UK focus because I
> > live here and organised the first mapping party here, stuff like that.
> >
> > This focus isn't something I'm proud of, and work to make it more
> > global. Apologies to people in australia that don't even have country
> > boundaries on the slippy map yet.
>
> There's quite a few things that are hard to do for non-UK users...
>
> For example, is anyone outside UK has been able to send money for the
> OSMonth ?

Yes, my bank is complining at me about it because I have to tell them
the incoming SWIFT/IBAN number apparently. Or, paypal works.

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

> SteveC a écrit :
> > Nah, it was worldwide from the start but had this UK focus because I
> > live here and organised the first mapping party here, stuff like that.
> >
> > This focus isn't something I'm proud of, and work to make it more
> > global. Apologies to people in australia that don't even have country
> > boundaries on the slippy map yet.
>
> There's quite a few things that are hard to do for non-UK users...
>
> For example, is anyone outside UK has been able to send money for the
> OSMonth ?

Yes I was able to sen Money to the UK for OSM Stuff.
PayPal took one or two days to register. Not that I like PayPal, but it was
the only cheap possibility to do so; except sending Cash per snail-mail.

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

> And look at wikipedia now. Its not a race and I'm sure in
> another year OSM will look very different from today.

I agree that Wikipedia is doing fine today. But the process of
getting there was long and painful. You can go back and read the
mailing list archives. The various stages of denial are very
similar to those of OSM. Perhaps it always takes three years?

I guess I should take a break and check back next year or so.

> The lack of something to look at in Sweden is regrettable but
> its not like this is the end of the world.

No, but it feels like the end of trying to promote OSM in Sweden.

> Maybe, who knows. If the project had had google like funding
> from the outset then maybe we wouldn't be having this
> discussion. From little acorns though...

The misguided belief that funding is the missing component, was
part of Wikipedia's problem too. Since we are not going to
receive sufficient funding anyway, this belief is only going to
slow us down. The sooner we all realize that we have to solve the
problems without waiting for funding, the better.

When I say the slippy map is useless, I'm not arguing, I'm simply
telling the truth. There is no way you can change that by arguing.

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

> I seem to recall somewhere in the old grey cells that this was started
> as providing a free map for the UK? In the same way that the US already
> has one. So the fact that thee is anything outside that area seems like
> a bonus to me.

If this were to be true, I have really misunderstood a lot. I owe
an apology to all the people I have tried to pull in here. I guess
none of the Wikipedia articles in Hungarian, Russian etc. mention
OSM as a U.K. project. They surely need to be updated then!

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Lester Caine wrote:
>
>> I seem to recall somewhere in the old grey cells that this was started
>> as providing a free map for the UK? In the same way that the US already
>> has one. So the fact that thee is anything outside that area seems like
>> a bonus to me.
>
> If this were to be true, I have really misunderstood a lot. I owe
> an apology to all the people I have tried to pull in here. I guess
> none of the Wikipedia articles in Hungarian, Russian etc. mention
> OSM as a U.K. project. They surely need to be updated then!

Seems that it was I who was mistaken, but in my defence I would add that
a couple of UK only projects do seen now to have folded and are working
with OSM instead.
The fact that there is not a freely available UK map is an annoyance
that many people had been working on, and which Steve's sponsorship by
multimap would seem to support. I can see why multimap would be
interested as the change in style of maps as you zoom on multimap can be
anoying, especially when trying to find a location having used the road
level and a step in then changes all the road colours.
A single standard world wide and covering all levels of zooms will be
very atractive.

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

> Andy Robinson wrote:
> > And look at wikipedia now. Its not a race and I'm sure in
> > another year OSM will look very different from today.
>
> I agree that Wikipedia is doing fine today. But the process of
> getting there was long and painful. You can go back and read the
> mailing list archives. The various stages of denial are very
> similar to those of OSM. Perhaps it always takes three years?
>
> I guess I should take a break and check back next year or so.
>
> > The lack of something to look at in Sweden is regrettable but
> > its not like this is the end of the world.
>
> No, but it feels like the end of trying to promote OSM in Sweden.

One think to speed this up would be to setup a mapnick renderer at your PC and
render some of the tiles for the server.
For a starting point we need many people to help out creating the starting
tiles.

...

> There is no way you can change that by arguing.

Yes and this is the reason it would make sense to help rendering the tiles.

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

> The lack of something to look at in Sweden is regrettable but> its not like this is the end of the world.

No, but it feels like the end of trying to promote OSM in Sweden.

I really think you've got the wrong end of the stick. At no point has anyone said that the new slippy won't have as good coverage over your house as over mine. It's already been rendered at some zoom levels - but SteveC is changing the code so quickly, and going back to re-render parts, fill in the missing bits and so on that it's turning into a complete mess! Pick anywhere in Europe, UK includedsince and zoom in and out, and you'll see some layers from the first day, some from last week, and some rendered in the last few days.

But I don't mind, since I can see where it's all going, and I'm happy to wait and keep mapping stuff. Don't get so despondent so easily!

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

I've been meaning to tidy this up, but here's my "installing on
ubuntu" howto. I'm using latest Ubuntu and am generating tiles fine.
There was a few problems with accessing the database when I finished
as I've never used postgres before, but hopefully this'll get you a
bit further along:

YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO THE FOLLOWING, BUT I'M TRYING TO
DOCUMENT EVERYTHING I DID

cd mapnik
svn update
sudo python scons/scons.py install
cd ..

END OF STUFF YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO DO

I had disk space issues because the location that I placed my
planet.osm.bz2 did not have enough space to hold the unzipped
planet.osm. You might want to unzip the file, then run something like
the following command:

Edit generate_tiles.py editing the values at the end of the file to
match your system.
Edit osm.xml
Use search and replace to replace all instances of /home/steve/vmap0
with the correct path on your system, /home/john/osm/tiling/vmap0 for
me.
Use search and replace to replace all instances of /home/steve/
symbols with the correct path on your system, /home/john/osm/tiling/
symbols for me.
Use search and replace a number of times to replace host, user and
dbname in the DataSource tags. Mine ended up looking like this, if
you've followed my instructions yours will look similar, with the
user 'john' replaced with your own username:

Re: [Fwd: Re: Newbie - queries and usability suggestions]

On 11/24/06, Jonas Svensson <[hidden email]> wrote:
> On 24 Nov 2006 at 18:03, Jonas Svensson wrote:
>
> > I am trying to follow that to do some mapnick rendering and got a
> > problem:
> > Package postgresql-8.1-plruby does not seem to exist in ubuntu, is
> > it really needed?
>
> Another one is missing: postgresql-8.1-postgis.
> I guess I have to find it elsewhere or this is futile.

The Ubuntu, postgis package is either broken or doesnt exist, I cant
remember which. YOu have to compile from source. See:

Looking at that page I notice that they do not mention architecture
sparc so that is probably my problem as this is what I got: "Ubuntu-
Server 6.06.1 _Dapper Drake_ - Release sparc (20060807.1)".
I guess I will have to compile it myself as Nick B. wrote.
Anyway, thanks to you both.

Satellite imagery copyright

Unforturenately there is an section of the UK coastline for which the script
produces no data, and I think this is probably due to the shapefile having
no data, probably due to there being very heavy cloud cover over the
affected area.

I can't trace the coastline from the JOSM landsat plugin, as there is heavy
cloud cover showing there as well, and the NPE maps dont cover that far
north.

The Landsat 4/5 imagery is available from
https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/mrsid.pl, and whilst not having the same
resolution as the later Landsat images, has the advantage of being cloud
free for the relevant area.